


Panopticon

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blood, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Can I Literally Emphasise The Blood Part Any More, Disassociation, Gen, Horror, Memory Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Project Kuron Spoilers, depersonalisation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 16:29:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15441090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: His name is Takashi Shirogane. He is twenty-five years old. He is the leader of Voltron.These are absolute truths. Truths that cannot be corrupted. There are also some lesser truths.





	Panopticon

**Author's Note:**

> Please note the tags and be cautious!

 

_ Panopticon _ / panˈɒptɪk(ə)n/

noun,  _ historical. _

a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.

  
  


Shiro wakes up to the sound of screaming. It’s familiar enough - background noise draining in out of the dark. The noise is like a collected pool of fluid in the base of his eardrum, like a bruise against the tender point cradled at the back of his skull. He turns over and falls back to sleep. It’s ten minutes later, waking to persistent banging against his door, a susurration of panicked voices, pitched like heat rising, that Shiro is resurrected and remembers: his name is Takashi Shirogane. He is twenty-five years old. He is the leader of Voltron.   

These are absolute truths. Truths that cannot be corrupted. There are also some lesser truths. Like venial sins, they waver, blurred like long-dead children running out of the corner of photographs, laughter heard shaking the dust of empty rooms. They are: 

Every morning, he is pulled out of an arena and opens his eyes to a castle. Every morning, he opens his eyes, opens his way out of a Galra cell waiting at the back of his mind, and goes out to fight. And when they win, there’s a word for it:  _ Champion.  _

Like venial sins, it would be easy to assume these thoughts don’t matter in their smallness, that they are pinpricks against blots. 

That’s a mistake. 

 

*

 

He reaches out, his hand pale and lilac, illuminating briefly like lightning through a stained glass window. The colour of it pricks at him, itches something slow and flesh-sticky at the back of his eyes, but the door opens and the light pours through in gasps.

These days, Shiro has the feeling his senses have gotten sharper. It’s just that the world seems all too much most days. He can hear the hiss of the vents, the thrum of the castle like a constant wet heartbeat, the noise of Pidge chewing like the churn of mixing cement. It’s to the point it hurts, some days, like his skin is a suit of needles all facing inwards. All it takes is the slightest stimuli to bleed. 

When he inhales, he breathes in copper, salt, the faint underlicking of something cooling. It’s familiar, even overlying the faint, sterile scent of the Castle - so familiar he doesn’t even blink as Lance barrels into him, shrieking about stepping out of a shower into a horrorshow. 

Which Shiro knows it is, looking at the blood all along the corridor. It’s cloying, smeared across the walls and floors, messy droplets sliding to weep at their feet. There’s so much of it - something flashes behind his eyes when he blinks - that it looks like it ought to be fake. The smell suggests it isn’t. 

“It’s probably an animal,” he says on automatic. They’re all looking at him, bedheaded, eyes round and shiny like those of something small in a trap, and he bites down midway through that thought, swallows around it before continuing. “We ought to scan the Castle to see where it’s gotten to. It might be in trouble.”

“Might be?” Pidge echoes, shocked, as Hunk immediately says, “Oh, dude, my guy, Shiro, you’re great, but no way in hell am I splitting up to look for this  _ thing. _ ”  

The walls hum around them, the glisten of the smears like sweat. 

“Together then,” Shiro says. Lance nods frantically, white-knuckled in his grasp on Hunk’s arm. Shiro can see the way his hair, still wet, leaves droplets on the floor that turn the blood into watercolour. Even the fall of footsteps is metallic, crisp like singeing. The blood is still there, a constant like their own heartbeats. The smell of it is so thick it’s pushing over into Shiro’s other senses, tangling up in them, manifesting as taste. It collects at the back of his mouth, humid every time he inhales the tang of it meshed with recycled air - wet like saliva, raw meat, as if you accidentally bit the inside of your own cheek and overstepped, bit through the whole soft tear of it instead.  

“Shiro,” Keith says. That part’s a question, but because Keith is Keith he’s able to phrase the next thing he says as a statement. “I don’t think we’re looking for something wounded.”

Keith’s right.  _ Drained _ would be more accurate. Shiro feels the weight of their gazes as he looks at the continuing state of the corridor, the liquid unspool of it. He swallows. 

“Yeah,” he hears himself replying. “I think you’re right.” 

 

*

 

When Shiro was one of arena’s darlings, they housed him on the third floor of the containment bay. All the windows faced inwards. This new, sleek model had been built after a family held there managed to pry open a sealing mechanism and hurl themselves out. Their daughter had been due to meet the Champion the day after. They wiped her name from Shiro’s rota before he could get it to stick, so she resides instead with the other empty spaces in his head, a cemetery of open graves and missing persons. 

The design of the bay - with the guard station centered, surrounded by the windows of the cells - allowed a minimum number to watch a maximum amount. Those held lived with the awareness they might be watched at any given moment. Not that it prevented guards from looking away for minutes, or hours, or a time that felt so long it was out of time. Shiro lay on his back listening to the echo of these blind spots, baring his teeth at the stupidity of those calling for help - something, it turns out, sounds the same everywhere and in every language. The last great universal is fear. He felt selfishly grateful for the safety of Championship, the guards’ eyes the only thing to reach him. Even riddled with black holes, he’s sure his memory would - surely he would remember something like that? 

 

* 

 

They run into Allura, about halfway through their descent into the newly soft meat of the Castle. Coran, apparently, is fine. He’s scraped some of the wall and is running diagnostic on what came away on his hands. 

“You are aware, of course,” she says, with an eerie, faraway kind of calm, “That Alteans do not bleed red.”

“I am now, Princess,” Shiro replies, feeling the eyes of the other paladins at his back. He’s not surprised. He knows red is not a universal. He’s had enough colour on his hands to know. 

 

*

 

When Shiro’s aunt had been stationed at the military base just outside of Berlin, Shiro had been twelve and well-fed on horror stories leaking down through the internet into his ears: a drip-fluid education. One night, he listened to the story of a German family, murdered in their barn with a hatchet, scalped and piled like discards. How the killer lived in the house after, smoke rising from the chimneys, eating their food and sleeping nestled in the unspoilt blankets. How the killer had probably lived above the family for months, in their lonely attic like woodworm. A waiting infestation. How whoever it was had got away clean with the whole thing. 

They say the horror is in the unseen. That horror is in what is waiting out in the black.They’re only partially right. Our mind expands to fill the void, of course. But what about when the light - automatic, controlled - leaves you always watched? What when the light leaves you nowhere to hide? 

 

*

 

They make the rounds of the Castle together, hovering close and in silence, just the sound of their breathing and opening doors and air ventilation - just different kinds of recycled air. 

_ We are all made of stardust,  _ the Olkari had said to them, and Shiro had bit down on the response that flooded his mouth, instinctive and metallic. It wouldn’t have been appropriate. 

 

*

 

Five hundred metres down from meeting Allura, two things happen, so close together they seem to be seamless, connected, two vertebrae to a singular fused spine. Shiro is still following the trail, now with Allura, still with the other paladins. He can practically smell their shallow breathing over his shoulder, gone sour with sleep and uncertainty. 

The first thing is Shiro spots a clump of something on the floor ahead, matted and reddened by the surrounding liquid like a dye bath. 

He crouches down, reaches out towards it but does not touch. Doesn’t need to. He’s always had good eyesight. 

Realisation makes him go very still and silent inside, like just after a bout, just in the same way. He remembers something new suddenly: how he’d stand, silent and docile in the roaring arena after it was done, and hold his hands out to the guards so they could put the chains back on. 

It’s a handful of hair. It looks human. It’s white. 

He stands. 

“What’s wrong?” Keith asks. Shiro says nothing. That’s when Pidge notices the second thing. The carnage breaks off down a very particular route, one burned into the underside of Shiro’s own eyelids. 

“That’s the same way as -” they say. 

“The lions,” Hunk says, through gritted teeth, and before Shiro knows what is happening, they’re all running, hearts contracting, hammering down the slippery iron of the corridor to the hangar. 

It all happens pretty fast after that. Everything falls sideways, slips. Keith does slip, in fact; skids, skinning something probably, or else getting smothered in the previous mess. It’s hard to tell, and when Shiro helps him up, his hands come away covered in it, tacky palmprints like bespoke gloves. 

_ Blood brothers,  _ he thinks but doesn’t say, almost laughs. Something insistent itches behind his eyes when he blinks, something he’s forgetting, something he’s forgotten, but not now.  _ Not now.  _

The lights of the hangar sense their body heat, the sweat of them, and flicker on, and on, illuminating the room.. Like a porch light, a homecoming.

The blood comes to an abrupt stop in front of Black. _ A clean break _ , Shiro thinks. He’s not sure why he’s relieved. Her gangway is down, but it’s clean. It’s okay, then. Nobody got to her. Even though she doesn’t respond to him these days, it doesn’t matter. What matters is nobody got to her. Shiro is very, very tired of the weight of what he couldn’t protect. 

He feels something crunch under his boot when he steps forward. He feels the others fan out, flanking his back or watching it. He doesn’t stop to see if they take out their bayards. He wouldn’t blame them. He kneels down again, cautious of picking up the crushed part of human spine. He knows what it is. The small portion of bone looks flimsy, like a child’s toy, dirty in the middle of this sanitised future. He sees the glint of metal and nudges it, just barely, with the tips of his fingers. 

There’s a metal plate grafted onto the bone.  _ Subject Y0XT39. _ The light is like that. The light leaves nowhere to hide. 

 

*

 

Here are some truths: 

His name is Takashi Shirogane. He is twenty-five years old. He is the leader of Voltron.  

Here’s another truth: he knows what it is to feel watched, all the time, by someone he doesn’t know but senses is there all the same. 

And another: sometimes things live in places where you think you are safe and come for you in your beds, sneaking in along a line of rot. A waiting infestation.

Another: he doesn’t remember a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.

He feels the shift of bodies behind him.  Shiro knows how to listen for the sound of blind spots. 

“Have Coran test the blood type,” Shiro says, turning to them, helpless. This time, he doesn’t hold out his hands. There are no chains in this version of his world. “I think it’s going to be mine.”   
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This was originally intended for a zine and was inspired by several real-life examples: the Hinterkaifeck murders, the Atlanta House of Blood case and the development of the Panopticon-style prison, as designed by Jeremy Bentham.


End file.
